When the credit crunch hit Iceland, it hit hard.
As easy money dried up around the globe, all of Iceland's banks - the backbone of the country's wealth - were in trouble, with debt ten times greater than the economy.
Iceland's collapse was the fastest in history, with 85 percent of the economy wiped out in weeks.
In the aftermath there was only one financial institution that did not lose money for its customers, Audur Capital.
Founded by two women on the investment principle of "if we don't understand it we're not buying it," there is a lot of talk about the difference it would have made if more women were on the trading floors.
"Its been 99 percent men," says Audur Capital's Halla Tomasdottir. "They were men that wanted to take risk, wanted speed, wanted individual rewards and excessive rewards."
With her American MBA and decades of experience in corporate management, Johanna Waagfjord from Hagar Ltd says reforming the global economy means making room for more women.
"Women think what's good for the whole, where men think what's in it for them," she explains.
A recent French study looked at the top 40 companies there. It showed that the higher the ratio of women in upper management, the better the company has performed during this financial crisis.
There is new evidence emerging that some of what happens on trading floors may be partly the result of male hormones.
Former Wall Street trader Dr John Coates has measured testosterone levels in traders.
When they had high levels of testosterone they made a lot more money that day.
So it turns out these traders were massively hormonal and these hormones had affected their trading performances quite dramatically.
But when testosterone levels get too high, traders became over confident, took too much risk and then the bubble burst.
"One of the ways of eliminating that instability is by having more women in the trading rooms," Dr Coates says. "They've got very different endocrine profiles from men."
source: newshub archive
